OER Training

Project Start Date: 2007

Open Educational Resources, or OER, offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning through accessible content and, importantly, teacher-led knowledge-sharing processes. By developing sharing structures, OER aims to bring participants into a more fair and level playing field for learning. ISKME’s participation in the global “Open Education” movement over the last four years is rooted in the idea that equitable access to high-quality education is a social right.

Created by ISKME, OER Commons (www.oercommons.org) is a free teaching and learning network, bringing together over 50,000 educational resources available for anyone to use. Resources on the site can be searched and filtered using a rich set of descriptive data, including terms of use. Teachers, students, and others enrich this “metadata” when they tag, rate, and review materials, and share what works for them.

OER Commons is helping transform how K -12 teachers and college faculty view their roles in collaborating around developing and improving educational materials from kindergarten through college. Teachers are participating in workshops that use OER Commons as a resource for building new curricula. Many are energized when they find they can download resources for free, modify them however they like, and write reviews and comments about what works best so other teachers can benefit from their expertise. Through OER Commons, sustainable and innovative approaches to learning are shifting the nature of education as we know it.

In 2007, ISKE’s Open Educational Resources initiative, OER Commons was honored by The Tech Museum of Innovation’s Tech Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity.